Just the other day, in the lineup at the local coffee shop, I heard a couple of people complaining about the state of Canadian politics.

“Too much power in the hands of the leader,” one said, digging out change to pay for his double-double.

“You can say that again,” said the other. “If only individual members of Parliament didn’t need to have their nomination papers signed by the party leader.”

They agreed, as the queue neared the cash register, that putting more power in the hands of MPs would radically alter their jaded views of Canadian politicians.

Okay, I’m making this up. Of course that conversation didn’t happen.

But here’s a fact: Canadian politics is messed up because citizens —not just MPs — feel disconnected from the people holding power in this country.

Michael Chong, the Conservative MP for Wellington-Halton Hills, has been much praised over the past week for his attempt to put checks on the power of political leaders and back into the hands of members of Parliament. As my colleague Chantal Hébert has noted, that’s only a start. It’s a do-it-yourself repair job inside the so-called Ottawa bubble.

If we’re serious about fixing our broken politics, I can think of some measures that are equally deserving of our immediate attention and enthusiasm — with potentially larger impact on the relationship that counts; the one between electors and elected.

I’m thinking in particular here about advertising — political and government advertising. Whether we admit it or not, advertising has become a primary channel of communication between politics and citizens, and it increasingly resembles a Wild West in terms of standards and rules.

What could we do right now? Three steps are available to us, each as easy to embrace as Chong’s reforms:

We need to have a conversation about whether we should continue to allow political advertising in between elections.

This is a new feature of Canadian politics. It’s less than a decade old. We have rules and spending limits for ads during elections; none for this new wave of political advertising that has crept up on us, unannounced and unregulated. Is there anyone brave enough to put forward a proposed ban on between-election advertising?

If we’re stuck with advertising between elections, it seems we’re recognizing that political parties are just another consumer marketer. How about subjecting them to the same standards?

Any political party could at any time declare that its advertising will henceforth be run in accordance with the code of Advertising Standards Canada. This could include clause 14, which states: “Advertisements shall not demean, denigrate or disparage any identifiable person, group of persons, firm, organization, industrial or commercial activity, profession, product or service or attempt to bring it or them into public contempt or ridicule.”

Speaking of disparaging firms and commercial activity, how about those new ads this fall from your federal government, taking a poke at the wireless and telecom providers? We learned this week that the Conservative government is spending $9 million on its new ad campaign against Canadian cellphone providers. “More Choice. Better Service. Lower Prices,” the ads state, as though the government was the chief competitor, not the regulator, of a wireless industry that employs hundreds of thousands.

The federal government has since 2006 spent an estimated half-billion dollars or more on advertising, including $100 million on those ever-present Economic Action Plan ads.

Is this political advertising? Or, as the government claims, simply money spent to “inform” Canadians?

Ontario solved this problem almost a decade ago when it passed a law requiring the Auditor-General to review all government ads for political content.

As coincidence would have it, Liberal MP David McGuinty has put forward a private member’s bill to do the same thing as his brother’s government did in Ontario. As with Chong’s bill, it is a bold but simple step to take some political poison out of the system. Unlike Chong’s reforms, it is aimed at the relationship between politicians and citizens, not just the struggle for power between leaders and MPs. Yet this private member’s bill has received a fraction of the attention given to Chong’s bill.

Those fictional people in the coffee shop may not even know the name of their local MP, but they are being pummeled by political ads that are flourishing in a mainly lawless state. With political will, this new taste for reform could transform Ottawa and the political culture outside the capital.

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